A customer takes money out of a Bank of America ATM machine. Images of banks took a beating after the 2008 financial crisis. / Joe Raedle, Getty Images

by Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY

by Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY

One moment, they were scapegoats for the world's financial crisis and Hollywood's favorite whipping boy. Now, well, they're on a serious image roll.

Four big banks ranked among the Top 10 national brands in consumer perception improvement for the first half of 2013, according to a new study from the research firm YouGov BrandIndex. It tracks consumer opinion of brands through 5,000 online interviews every weekday. Instead of asking what consumers specifically think of brands, it asks them to report if they remember hearing good things - or bad things - about the brands over the previous two weeks.

While those banks - Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley - all still have negative consumer perceptions, those perceptions continue to improve at a breathtaking pace. In fact, in terms of image improvement, Goldman, BofA and J.P. Morgan ranked first, second and third on the list culled from more than 1,000 brands. The image boosts come at a time that interest rates are low, the stock market is booming and unemployment continues to shrink.

"We're several years away from the financial crisis, and people forget," says Ted Marzilli, CEO of BrandIndex, a daily measurement of consumer perception of brands. "They had nowhere to go but up."

It hasn't been easy. These are some of the same banks whose executives were dragged before Congress to testify. Some took massive government loans to stay afloat. And some were linked to the robo-signing scandal that cost American homeowners their homes.

Never mind that. Things are looking peachy, image-wise. And it doesn't surprise Jeff Lotman, a brand consultant and CEO at Global Icons. "Money makes everyone nicer," he says. "They forgot that the banks - being greedy - put us there in the first place."

Also, says Marzilli, some of the banks have spent a lot of money on brand advertising campaigns to improve their images.

"People can only stay angry for so long," he says. "And some of these are companies are out there now doing some good," such as offering low-interest mortgages for home loans.

That said, it's not as if these brands are being let off the hook, says Marzilli, because they all still have negative ratings. And if there's another housing bubble - or they get mired, again, in deceptive lending scandals, "they'll move right back down."

Top 10 firms with the largest improvement in image perception for the first half of 2013: